Apr

Blog Comments - More Traffic, or a Waste of Time?

Filed Under blog comments, blogging, website traffic

Do blog comments bring more website traffic? In this era of Web 2.0, user generated content, a blog on every corner, and so on, does one need to have comments enabled in order to be considered a serious blogger?

Steve Pavlina disabled blog comments on his highly successful personal development blog some time ago. He posted about it and listed his reasons. Among those reasons were some interesting points, as well as some interesting data after the fact as far as the effect on website traffic.

I’m writing this from memory and giving you my own take on it, so forgive me if I get it a little wrong, but I think I have the salient points correct. When mentioning the reasons that he turned blog comments off, Steve basically said that only a small percentage of his visitors bothered to either read or leave comments. Of those who did leave comments, they mostly had some need to vent. In other words, a personal issue was brewing.

In my experience, though, if one person verbalizes it, many more are thinking it (or something else that’s equally valid). While it could be said that Steve is a little selfish in the sense that the whole point of having comments is to allow differing viewpoints to come out, I can sympathize. I have had some discussions with readers that just seemed to go no where and it was obvious that the person just wanted a platform to be a pain in the ass.

As a website publisher, you like to think that you offer something of value to the reader. In fact, I stress that anytime I’m counseling anyone on building a website. Anyone who “gets it” will, and therefore get value from it. That is true even if that value comes in the form of an opinion that the reader doesn’t like. If someone wants to comment on a different viewpoint, then perhaps you owe it to your readers to allow that to show through.

You don’t, however, want to get bogged down in having to respond to comments, most of which either don’t add a lot of value to your readership, or don’t really need a response (even though their tone and wording may seem to demand one). Let’s face it, many comments are really just there so that someone can get a link back to their site, their 15 minutes of fame, etc.

As a blogger, and more importantly , as a website publisher (following the principle, “don’t define yourself by the media you use to deliver your message”), there may be a better use of your time than responding to blog comments that really don’t need a response. You could, for example, spend your time creating new posts that would provide valuable information for thousands of visitors, rather than cover one point that might be of interest to only a few.

That having been said, I’m going to leave blog comments on (with Lucia’s Linky Love in place) for now on this blog. Since this is only my second post, we’ll have to see how it goes. Although I have a couple of blogs, and blogging suits my writing style in that “stream of consciousness” sort of way, I do much more work in building successful static content sites which don’t really have this problem in quite the same way.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Steve Pavlina’s take on blog comments is that he said turning commenting off it did not affect his traffic in any appreciable sort of way. Now, he’s got a log more going on over there than a blog. As I write this, he’s also got a static site (as I do, although this one is an infant as of today), and he has a forum, a newsletter, and so on. But, nevertheless, turning off blog comments did not hurt him, traffic-wise.

On one of my other blogs, I posted that building a solid content site was the way to win the war on keywords. One person commented that they put up a blog, made a couple of posts, and then let comment spam build traffic. My response, of course, was that you shouldn’t bet the farm on that as a way to build a business.

It should be noted that Steve is extremely prolific as a writer. He writes (flying in the face of what many “gurus” say) very long posts. He attributes much of his success (one million plus visitors per month) to the fact that he writes long posts. If you only write short posts, perhaps relying on visitors to provide user created content becomes pivotal to building out your content.

So, since comments are open as of this moment, I’m curious what other bloggers have to say about their experiences with this. Do you believe that blog comments bring more website traffic? Do you really feel that your overall visitor community benefits from the comments of others?

Do you think that your time could be spent in ways that would offer more value to the majority of your visitors? Will you be considered a less serious blogger if you turn comments off? I’m also curious as to what percentage of bloggers have comments turned on, but of course, we’ll just have to guess as that.

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